The Doctoral Consortium has the following objectives:

• Provide a platform for students to present their work and to meet other students in the community
• Provide feedback on students' current research and guidance on future research directions
• Offer each student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from researchers and students outside their own institution
• Promote the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research
• Contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference event.

The DC is organized in sessions embedded in the main RCIS 2019 conference program.

Interested PhD students are invited to submit papers (maximum length: 6 pages) addressing the following content:

• Introduce the field of research and identify the main challenges
• Formulate the research questions and objectives, justifying why they were chosen
• Outline the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions
• Sketch the research methodology that is being applied
• Describe the proposed solution and the results achieved so far
• State how the suggested solution is different or better than existing approaches
• Indicate the issues still to be resolved, and describe the next steps that are planned.

Submissions must be written in English, must be authored by the student only, and must follow the IEEE 2-column format available at (http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html).

Submissions must be unpublished and must not be under review for any other conference, workshop or journal.

By submitting a DC paper, doctoral students commit that they will attend the conference to present their research. Accepted papers will not be published if the author does not register at the conference to present the paper.

The submission site address is: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcis2019. Please choose “Doctoral Consortium” as a submission type.

Authors of accepted submissions will submit the camera-ready version using the same format as the initial submission. The reviewers’ comments shall be taken into account in the camera-ready paper. Only papers that have been presented by their authors will be published in the Conference Proceedings. Authors will receive information on the presentation, and how to register for the conference. There will be a discounted registration fee for DC students.

Doctoral paper submission deadline:	February 1st, 2019 March 1st, 2019 (“Anywhere on Earth”)
Author notification and registration opening:	April 1st, 2019
Camera-ready deadline and author registration:	April 12th, 2019
Authors registration deadline:	April 28th, 2019
RCIS’2019 Conference:	May 29th-31st, 2019

The review and decision of acceptance will be based on the opinions of at least two reviewers that will conduct a blind review process. Many factors will be considered, including the quality of the proposal, the clarity of the paper, and the stage within the doctoral education program. The selection process will, when possible, maximize a good coverage of the topics of the conference and diversity of participants' background, research objectives, and research methods.

The reviewers for a proposal will consist of two members of the international program committee.

Each student will present his or her work to the participants with substantial time allowed for discussion and questions by participating researchers and other students. The discussion will be guided by a member of the committee of expert mentors, who will play the role of proposal discussant together with another Phd student that has been accepted at the Doctoral Consortium.

Each student will then be asked to review another accepted DC paper and prepare a few questions to be discussed during the consortium day. The papers will be assigned in advance such that the students will have sufficient time to review the paper and prepare their questions.

The consortium sessions will have an informal atmosphere where every participant is encouraged to be actively involved in the discussion, the core objective being to learn how to conduct excellent research, as opposed to criticizing each other’s work.